Social media is all about sharing valuable and relevant content with followers and fans, so it makes perfect sense to include social media marketing in your content promotion plans. Consumers on average spend more than 25 percent of their online time with social media, which makes them a highly accessible target. When you share content across your social media channels in a variety of different ways, you increase your overall reach as well as engage with a more diversified audience.

To generate the maximum amount of buzz, you’ll want to heavily promote your content for the first 24 hours from the time it goes live. Why 24 hours? Social media is a dynamic medium and most social posts have a relatively short life span. The tighter the timeframe of your promotion, the more engagement and sharing you’ll generate.

Start with Facebook
Share your content with your Facebook followers one time within the first 24 hours. Don’t post updates more than two or three times in the week following the release of your content. When you do post, be sure to vary your updates:

• If your first post is a link post, your next two updates should be image or video posts. Varying the type of posts helps you appeal to different audience segments, and provides valuable feedback on what type of Facebook posts drive the highest level of engagement.
• Each post should feature different text and images.
• To gain additional visibility, ask your employees, friends and family to share your business page updates to their personal Facebook profiles.

Add Twitter Tweets
Because a new tweet has an average lifespan of two hours, you’ll want to schedule three or four updates to your Twitter account within the first 24 hours. Vary the times of your updates, and break them up with retweeted content from others if possible. Be sure to use different copy, hashtags and mentions for each update. Adjust the timing of your updates so that it’s aligned with the frequency of tweets that you would normally send on a typical day.

Pin Images to Pinterest or Instagram
Post the blog post images to either Pinterest or Instagram once within the first 24 hours. You want to share your visual post images to a relevant Pinterest pinboard or in your Instagram account after your original blog post goes live. If your target audience is primarily middle-aged or over, post your images to Pinterest. If you are targeting a younger audience, post to Instagram.

As for image content, you can either post the actual images that were used to illustrate the original content or match relevant images that tie-in to the original article.

Post a Link to LinkedIn
Once within the first 24 hours, either post a content link on your LinkedIn profile or create a long-form blog post through LinkedIn Publisher. If other team members have their own LinkedIn profiles, rotate posting assignments to reach a wider and more diverse audience. Post to your company page or to relevant LinkedIn groups as appropriate.

Don’t Forget Google+
Post to your company profile or to your Google+ communities once during the first 24 hours. Since Google+ allows long updates, you can either share the full blog post or create an introduction to your content and add a link to your original post. You can also share with your Google+ communities if the post is particularly high-quality, or if it is highly relevant to a particular community.